Duff McKagan, Axl Rose open up GNR reuniting

Bassist shares thoughts on rehearsing again with GN’R, playing new songs

By David Sands
September 6, 2016

A joint interview with members of Guns N’ Roses certainly isn’t exactly an everyday event. So we were pretty excited when we heard that Duff McKagan and Axl Rose recently allowed the cameras to roll on them for a chat about the reunited band with the weekly Brazilian news show Fantástico on Globo TV (transcribed by Blabbermouth).

During the interview, Rose revealed the impetus for him, Duff and Slash reuniting was Paul Tollett of Coachella getting in touch with him and expressing interest having members of the classic GNR band play his music festival. Rose then got in touch with Slash and shortly after spent some time hanging out with McKagan. These discussions eventually led to them to getting together to play some songs.

“Getting into rehearsals, it was really just kind of one day at a time,” McKagan said. “I don’t know that I thought too much about how far ahead. It was just really cool to play some of the music with the guys that I was playing it with.”

The bassist also opened up about playing songs from Chinese Democracy, a newer GNR album put together by Rose without the participation of others from the group’s classic lineup.

“I had listened to the record, but when you start to play the songs as a player, you really discover all the layers in the songs,” he said. “But really kind of how you hear it and how I’m hearing the songs are maybe a little bit different. And when we went into rehearsals, we wanted to really own… like this is gonna be what we’re doing.”

Guns N’ Roses will resume their Not In This Lifetime… tour in South America this October.